


Secrecy

by NegativEvitageN



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Anderlock, Angst, M/M, Post-Reichenbach, Secret Relationship, Sherlock's 'death'
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:07:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,678
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1128682
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NegativEvitageN/pseuds/NegativEvitageN
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“And when they did touch, it was always like fire.” </p><p>Anderson and Sherlock’s relationship had always been a secret. When Sherlock died, Anderson had nowhere to turn. After the funeral, there’s a small gathering at 221b Baker Street, and he finds something in Sherlock’s bedroom that he never expected to find. Certain things come out in the open.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secrecy

**Author's Note:**

> I went ahead and rated it as Teen for the theme of death and grief and stuff, but it's really not that bad. Just hold in your heart the knowledge that eventually Sherlock does come back and everything works out for the better (even though it's not specifically implied in this story).

No one knew the truth. Not their families. Not their closest friends. Not any of the Scotland Yard detectives they worked with, trained to spot lies and yet so blind to what was right under their noses. No one saw what was really going on in the shadows.

Side-long glances of secret intentions. Stray touches that no one else would think twice about.

In public, they wouldn’t dare show their true feelings for each other. But, in private, when it was just the two of them, everything came out. And when they did touch, it was always like fire. The angry sex built up after a day of frustration, the frantic fuck in a semi-public space with the risk and fear of being caught at any moment, those rare nights of true intimacy and passion lasting for hours and hours of nothing but the two of them together, nothing could compare.

Everyone that observed them from the outside would think they hated each other. But if anyone could feel what those two men really felt, they’d know that it was quite the opposite. 

So when Sherlock plummets to his death off the side of St. Bart’s, Anderson has no one to turn to about how he truly feels. No one who would believe his grief. 

For the three days leading up to the funeral, Anderson can’t leave his apartment, can barely even leave his bed, calling into work as ‘sick’ even though he was sure everyone knew the true reason. He couldn’t possibly face them after what he’d done. All those look of blame that he knew he deserved.

When the funeral finally arrives, he dresses in his best and attends with the most dignity he can muster. With all the looks of distrust and wonder as to why he’s even there, he feels like nothing more than a mistress, hated and unwanted at the very funeral of the man he loved the most. Somehow, he makes it through the entire procession without shedding a tear.

Now, it’s an hour after the funeral, and Anderson finds himself parked along Baker Street a little ways from 221b. Everyone had been invited over after the funeral for a small gathering.

But it’s wrong, him being here without Sherlock. There’s no secret meeting, no sneaking in without anyone else knowing, no hiding in the dark. He was going to have to march straight in there, in front of everyone, for all to see.

He grips the steering wheel in trepidation. 

A little ways in front of him, a couple he’s never even seen before exits a car and walks into Sherlock’s apartment, like they’d done it a billion times before. Anderson doesn’t know why it feels like they’re trespassing on sacred ground. He can only imagine how John feels… how John was going to feel when Anderson walked in there as well…

With a sigh of finality, he grabs his keys and steps out onto the pavement, slamming the car door shut and fiddling with the keys for a moment more before finally making his way towards the door.

It’s already open, and he can hear noises upstairs, people moving around, talking, laughing, ‘celebrating Sherlock’s life’ as the old cliché goes. 

The second he steps across the threshold, he’s hit with Sherlock’s smell. The familiar smell of all those nights tangled in each other’s limbs. The smell of promises and lost potential. The smell of a man he would never see again.

He shivers and braces himself lightly against the wall with his fingertips, taking a moment to compose himself before carefully ascending the stairs.

Once he reaches the doorway to the 221b sitting room, he pauses a moment on the landing before stepping inside, now in open view. People are dispersed around the room, caught up in their own little conversations, too busy to pay him any attention. If they do look up upon his entry, it’s only briefly, and they don’t give him a second glance.

He catches snippets of the conversations around the room: “…helped me with a case.” “He didn’t really do that, did he?” “And then- and then he just jumped into the river!” laughter.

John is sitting in an armchair by the fireplace facing the rest of the room, surrounded by a couple of other people but seemingly not paying attention to what’s being said, resolutely staring at a spot on the wall. He looks up as Anderson enters the room, catches him with a look of confusion, quickly replaced by one of resignation, and returns to his blank stare. He doesn’t care that Anderson is here. He isn’t looking for a fight.

Mrs. Hudson is sitting on the sofa, surrounded by consoling friends and dabbing at her eyes. She forces on a smile and pats their hands as if _she_ were the one consoling _them_.

“There will never be a better man.”

Anderson looks around uncomfortably, wondering what he’s supposed to do. Obviously he should give his condolences, right? But… coming from him, he doubts it would sound sincere. And at this point, he can barely look John in the eye, much less work up the courage to try to talk to him.

Instead, he retreats to the kitchen.

There, along the counter, refreshments and snacks have been set up for the guests. He takes a cracker and begins to nibble on it if simply to have something to do. 

On the table in the middle of the room sits varied lab equipment: different sized flasks and beakers, test tubes in a rack, a burette, all sparkling clean. 

He moves around the table to inspect the cabinet against the wall.

Out in the sitting room, a couple of people start laughing. Anderson averts his gaze the other way. Looking down the hallway at Sherlock’s door, his heart skips a beat. The door is closed. John probably wasn’t allowing visitors in. Quickly, he moves to the kitchen window to block his view of the hallway and gazes down at the alleyway below to try and focus on anything else but the reason that he’s here.

Someone shuffles through the kitchen on their way to the toilet. Anderson looks up briefly at the movement, the other man gives him a silent nod, and then Anderson averts his gaze back out the window. When the guest slams the door shut, Anderson jumps. Someone else comes into the kitchen and approaches the counter, picking up a paper plate and stacking it with a few snacks. Anderson avoids eye contact. She leaves without a word.

Finishing off his cracker by the window, he decides to face his fear and just go back into the sitting room. That’s what he needs to do right? He needs to say something. He needs to at least try. (‘I’m sorry for your loss… Is that good enough? What else can I say?’) He crosses the kitchen halfway, stops for a second, gives one final look down the hallway, and then turns around to rejoin the group.

That is, of course, until he sees Inspector Lestrade walk in, and the full force of his guilt comes rushing back in waves. 

“John. It’s good to see you.”

God, he couldn’t do this. If Lestrade were to look his way, he’d be caught, and have to confront the guilt that he’d been burying.

Quickly Anderson turns around, to avoid confrontation by heading to the toilet. But it isn’t until he’s down the hallway that he remembers it’s already occupied. Panicking, and without thinking, he enters the one room in the entire apartment that was most familiar to him, the one room that he no longer had the right to enter.

Closing the door only partially, he takes a deep steadying breath and closes his eyes, trying to calm the adrenaline burning through his chest. He feels sick.

Looking, now, around Sherlock’s bedroom, his stomach drops and for a moment he loses his breath. Sherlock’s smell is even stronger in here, and suddenly years of memories flood him all at once. The bedroom might not be the same one as when they first met, but the smell never changed, _his_ smell, and it spoke of all the secrets both Anderson and Sherlock had tried so hard to conceal.

All those nights spent in this bedroom. His bedroom. Sherlock. A bedroom which Anderson had a strange feeling he would never get the chance to see again. Not like this. Not before they packed everything away.

Sentimentality. It’s stupid really. Sherlock would chide him for such feelings. There was no reason for him to look around the room with longing eyes, but he does anyways. There was no reason to clench his hands into to fight the emotions welling up in him, but he does anyways. There was no reason for any of it.

Knowing full well the ridiculousness of what he’s doing, he carefully sits on the made-up bed, wrinkling the duvet beneath him, and buries his face into the pillow, feeling the cool fabric against his skin and inhaling deeply. It still smells strongly of Sherlock’s shampoo, and he pretends, for just a moment, that Sherlock was there beside him and he wasn’t dead and none of what had happened today and just a few days before had ever happened. Pretending, just for a moment, that if he were to look up next to him, Sherlock would be staring back at him with a quirked eyebrow, prepared to make some condescending remark on how stupid he was acting.

But when he does look, Sherlock isn’t there, and Anderson knows that no matter what he does, he can never bring Sherlock back.

Gingerly, he pulls up his feet and curls up on top of the cold sheets, feeling both like a guest and a stranger, welcomed and unwelcomed, the bed so familiar yet suddenly foreign.

The background white-noise of conversation returns to him and he remembers there are other people in the apartment. And none of them were Sherlock.

Slowly, he stands, approaches the door, and touches the wood lightly, the door still slightly ajar. He should return, before things get out of hand. He should return before anyone finds him in here.

But…

Not yet willing to let go of his last chance to privately view the room, he rounds the room slowly, running fingertips along the wall and across furniture, taking in everything he can of what used to be Sherlock’s— what’s still Sherlock’s— what will always be Sherlock’s in his mind.

Was it wrong? Him touching Sherlock’s things like this? Picking up trinkets that weren’t his to pick up? Fingertips running across things he had no right to touch? At this point, he doesn’t care if it is. He just needs to feel Sherlock one last time, if only indirectly.

When he gets to the desk, he opens a drawer and shuffles a few things around. Paper, mostly. Old newspaper clippings. Some pens, some markers. Staples, binder clips. A worn journal roughly shoved into the back. He pulls it out.

The cover is rough, but durable, and terribly faded. Sherlock, if he had been here and this hadn’t been his own journal, would probably have been able to conclude exactly how old it was with a single look at the cover. Anderson, however, can not.

He flips it open. The first page is overflowing with short equations, crossed out or circled numbers, and a couple of question marks. It looked like scrap paper for a maths exam.

The next page, titled “Iron in Dirt”, follows the scientific method of an experiment, including a roughly drawn map, a couple of tables, lists of statistics, and a couple of paragraphs of conclusions, filling up two pages. A few short notes scatter around the margins, some crossed out, some circled, some directed with arrows, unintelligible to anyone but Sherlock.

The next couple of pages are very similar with different titled experiments, and Anderson quickly realizes that that’s what the entire journal is composed of. God, that was so Sherlock, wasn’t it? About four-fifths of the journal are filled before it turns to blank pages…

…All the pages that would have been filled had Sherlock not… If he hadn’t…

Blank pages that will never be filled now.

Anderson puts the journal back into the drawer and moves on, tracing fingertips along the edge of the desk before heading to the dresser.

Back out in the sitting room, Mrs. Hudson has stolen Inspector Lestrade’s attention, as John sits in the same position, staring at the same point on the wall, vaguely listening along.

“He was such a good man, you know? He helped so many people,” Mrs. Hudson comments, “He would never have done what they tried to claim he did in the papers. He just wouldn’t.”

“I know, Mrs. Hudson. He…” Lestrade tries to formulate a sentence, tries to find adequate words to celebrate Sherlock’s intelligence while avoiding turning the subject back to the circumstances around his suicide, but nothing seems quite good enough. Eventually he settles on, “Yeah. He was a good man.”

He wonders if John blames him for arresting Sherlock, wonders if that’s what pushed Sherlock over the edge, how he must have felt trapped, no escape, as if the entire world, including people whom he should have been able to consider friends, was against him. He tries not to think of it.

He clears his throat and tries to change the subject, “So… Has anyone else from The Yard stopped by yet?” It’s a weak subject, but it’s something.

“Oh!” Mrs. Hudson looks around her, “That young man from the forensics department was here just earlier. He didn’t say anything when he came in, though. Headed towards the kitchen. Must’ve stopped by the loo. What was his name again?”

Forensics? Lestrade thinks for a moment. She couldn’t possibly mean…

“Anderson,” John supplies, looking up from his point on the wall towards the kitchen, “Couldn’t have been the loo. He’d be back by now. Besides, Jacob just went.” He stands and looks past the kitchen to what he can see in the hallway. 

Lestrade follows his gaze down to Sherlock’s door, a horrible realization dawning on him.

Sherlock’s door. It’s open.

Back in the bedroom, Anderson replaces one of Sherlock’s shirts to its original position and then pulls the drawer out just a little bit further, convinced that he can see something in the back. When he reaches to the very back and pulls the little bundle out, he finds a scarf scrunched up in his hands.

A ridiculous scarf. A horribly tacky thing that Anderson had gotten Sherlock on his birthday as a sort of joke. 

_“You seem to be a little low on scarves,” Anderson comments sarcastically as Sherlock pulls the present from the bag, “I mean, gosh, I never see you wear one! You need something to keep that neck warm when I’m not here,” he jokes with a wink._

_Sherlock holds the scarf up with two fingers, with such an air of disdain that Anderson’s surprised it doesn’t melt between his fingers. Sherlock, acting like just touching it was enough to give him cancer, gives Anderson a pained smile, “Thanks for this hideous abomination, but in the future, leave the gift-giving to me.”_

_“You never give me any gifts.”_

_“My point. I don’t do **sentiment** ,” Sherlock says the word with disdain. “I’m throwing this thing out as soon as I can.” He shoves the scarf back in the bag, wads it up, and tosses it to the side._

_“Oh, come on, Sherlock! That cost me a whole eight pounds!” Anderson laughs, rolling closer to the other man playfully. He smiles and begins running his fingertips along Sherlock’s thigh, “But that’s not your real gift.”_

_“Oh?” Sherlock says with an air of disinterest, carding his fingers through Anderson’s hair._

_Anderson shifts his position, lies on his back, and places his hands above his head crossed at the wrist, “Your gift is what you get to do with it.”_

That ugly, cheap scarf didn’t last long. It tore that night, and Sherlock had promised to throw it out.

He had no idea Sherlock had kept it…

“John!”

“What the hell are you doing in here?!”

John bursts through the door, Lestrade attempting to hold him back, Mrs. Hudson close behind. Anderson turns to them slowly, trying his hardest to push the emotions back down as he looks each of them in the eye. John looks like he wants to strangle him. Anderson doesn’t blame him.

“I…” Anderson swallows, gripping the scarf tightly at his side as he thinks of an answer, “I don’t know what to say.”

“You have _no. right,_ ” John seethes, punctuating the last two words through clenched teeth, “No right to be in here. You think you can just come in here and mess with his things??” he gestures aggressively, “ _How dare you._ ”

Anderson watches him without an answer, face blank.

“What is this?” John continues, voice rising in volume along with his anger, “One more attempt to try and prove him a fraud? Planting evidence? Taking something? What are you doing in here? What gives you the right?”

The rest of the apartment is quiet, listening to the commotion down the hall. Mrs. Hudson has teared up again, watching the scene unfold in front of her with hands covering half her face.

“No.” Anderson replies simply. His eyes momentarily fall to the scarf in his hands, and then back up to John’s, “I was here… I’m here… to remember.”

“Remember what?”

“Him.” Anderson watches him with saddening eyes, waiting to see what he’ll do. John watches him back with suspicion.

“You just, think you can just walk in here?” He points out down the hallway, “You think you can come into my flat— _our_ flat—without looking at me, without saying a word to me, and come straight into _his bedroom_ without permission?”

“John—” Lestrade says softly, placing a calming hand on his arm. 

Something about his statement sparks anger in Anderson and before he can stop himself, he yells, “And why do I need _your_ permission to come into _his_ bedroom? I have more right to be in here than you do!”

“Excuse me?” John’s eyes look positively murderous.

“You have no idea—!” Anderson stops himself before he can give anything else away. He grinds his teeth and takes a deep breath through his nose. In a quieter voice, he concludes, “Don’t worry, I’m leaving.” and attempts to push past them, stuffing the scarf into his pocket.

“No,” John stops him roughly and shoves him up against the wall. He grabs Anderson’s wrist and tries to pull it out of his pocket, but Anderson resists. “What is that?”

With one final tug, John pulls Anderson’s hand out, scarf clutched tightly in his fist.

“This,” Anderson responds through a snarl, “is none of your business.”

He yanks his arm out of John’s grasp, gripping the scarf so tight that even through the fabric his fingernails indent the skin on his palm.

John grabs his shirt and shoves him back, holding him against the wall.

“John,” Lestrade warns, bracing himself to intervene at any moment. 

John leans in close, his voice dangerously low, and growls, “I’m not letting you steal from him.”

“Well technically it’s not his anymore, is it?”

And that, Anderson knows, is the wrong thing to say, even before John’s fist collides with his jaw.

Mrs. Hudson lets out a startled cry and flees the room, looking for help. Anderson’s knees give out and he slumps against the wall.

“Alright enough!” Lestrade yells, immediately pulling John back, just a bit too late in Anderson’s opinion. “Anderson, give back whatever you took and get out now.”

Anderson glares at them, holding his jaw, and says, with as little jaw movement as possible in order to avoid the pain ringing through his teeth, “I’m not giving it back.”

“Anderson,” Lestrade warns, “Don’t make me arrest you.”

He looks back stubbornly, knowing the world is against him. And really, he probably could’ve handled this situation better. The thought crosses his mind (‘He’s the one that assaulted me! Why aren’t you threatening to arrest him?’) but he doesn’t say it out loud, knowing it would only make things worse.

“At least let me explain.”

John stares at him, jaw set, fists clenched at his side, unwavering.

Anderson takes the lack of answer as prompt to continue, “You won’t believe me, but this scarf…” he holds it up in feeble presentation, “It means a lot. To me. There’s…” he tries to put into words what he wants to say, “I—” His voice breaks and he clears his throat. He looks into John’s eyes with determination, “Please, let me keep it. You have no idea how much it means to me.”

John’s anger breaks for a moment only to be replaced with confusion, looking between Anderson and the fabric in his hand with suspicion, “It’s a scarf.”

Anderson nods, “I gave it to him. When we, uh. It doesn’t matter when. Just… I gave it to him.”

John regards him with distrust.

“Please,” Anderson adds quickly, “It doesn’t even cost that much. It was only eight pounds.” He opens the scarf, “And it’s… torn. So, you wouldn’t have any need for it.”

He clears his throat, having run out of things to say, tonguing around his teeth where he can taste blood. 

Everything else was up to John now.

He looks to the door. People have crowded around to watch. They’re just as expectant of an answer as he is.

John shifts from one foot to the other, stares at him for a moment more, and takes a breath through his nose. After a moment more, he says lowly, “Take the scarf and get out.”

That’s all the permission he needs before he heads for the door. The crowd there splits as he approaches. He stops in the doorway for a second and looks at the bed one last time, and then he’s gone.


End file.
